


So Procreate and Pay Your Taxes

by MooseFeels



Series: Five for Fifteen Hundred [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cabins, Creature Dean, Deer, Fantasy, Forests, Human Castiel, woods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-04
Updated: 2014-03-04
Packaged: 2018-01-14 13:02:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1267510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MooseFeels/pseuds/MooseFeels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel didn't believe in fairies or ghosts or spirits or guardians or any of that. Didn't believe in magic at all. <br/>And then he saw Dean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	So Procreate and Pay Your Taxes

Dean came and went. It was his nature. It didn’t mean that he didn’t leave behind, though.

“I’ll be back,” he’d murmured into Castiel’s neck, face bent and buried into his skin.

Castiel always nodded. Always smiled sadly as he watched Dean walk gingerly into the woods.

They lived in the woods, far from the beaten dirt road out of the forest and to the paved highway. From the paved highway out into the cities and the world. They live deep amidst the trees in a small house made of warm, flat stones with a high roof and a warm hearth and a huge cellar full of jam and root vegetables and confit.

Castiel had lived in the city, once. Only coming out once in a while with great bows and quivers full of arrows and a head full of thoughts and problems that buzzed through him like bees. With a temper like wildfire. With a sadness like a river flowing out of his soul. His head is still busy, sometimes. His temper still snaps, sometimes. His sadness still floods through him, sometimes. It all comes so much less often now, though.

He is happier here, with Dean. He is gentler, too.

He stares down the rough path that Dean wandered down months ago and wonders idly when he’ll be back. It’s spring now, early spring, and he is tired of living in their house alone.

Castiel lets the door slam behind himself and picks up the broom from the kitchen and sweeps the wooden floor of the house. It’s more a cabin than anything, really, all one large room with a bed tucked in the corner and a bathroom delicately place opposite the hearth and the kitchen. A few large, comfortable chairs in front of it, a tall bookcase full of the books Castiel couldn’t leave in the city and a few records. His bow came with him. His arrows, too. Thick blankets and heavy pillows. A well stocked toolbox. A better stocked first aid kit.

He finishes sweeping and realizes that spring is as good a time as any to beat the rug, so he rolls the thing up and heads to the clothes line with the broom.

Castiel’s a bit leaner now. Still muscular, not stripped and starving by any stretch of the imagination, but something about growing and hunting most of their food, it changed the shape in him.

He pants as he beats the thing as hard as he can, stirring soot and ash and dirt from the fibers. Leaves it to air for a while as he struts back inside. Touches the deeply carved wood of the door frame for luck.

He didn’t used to be superstitious.

Castiel was hunting, in the spring. Deer. His bowstring pulled tight. His arrow at the ready. His mind quiet, the world observed down the shaft. Sharp and tight. He’d had it pulled. He had been ready. He’d seen them, the flash of the color and shape. The antlers. Just waiting for the deer to raise its head.

He thought maybe he was a college kid, pulling some sort of weird prank at first. Had shouted at him for not wearing safety colors, demanded he pull the antlers off.

And then Dean had stopped laughing and apologizing and just ran.

There was swiftness to him. A way of his gait. A shape to his body. A panic. And it all made Castiel realize, suddenly, that Dean wasn’t pulling a prank.

Those antlers were his.

So Castiel chased him. Threw down his bow and arrows and ran as fast as he dared, as hard as he could. Tore through the woods. Knew with an unsettling certainty that this was important.

He got pretty far too until he tripped over a root and twisted his ankle.

He must have sat on the floor of the forest for a good hour before Dean approached him again, saying, “You’re not gonna shoot me, are you?”

That was nearly three years ago now. It felt like a lifetime.

Now Castiel knew. He didn’t have to believe.

There were frayed edges of the world, places where people could fall through and find the kind of raw magic that made up the universe. Torn places in the patchwork quilt of the world where people like Dean lived, people who weren’t really human at all. People who were the spirits and protectors of herds, of predators, of trees and plants. People who had such strange forests hidden inside of them.

And Dean had lived out here in the woods as the deer and the elk and the horned things since there was a forest, since there was a shape of it here in the mind, in the world.

He leaves in the winters. Comes back with the springs, with a new set of antlers and a wild look in his eye for a few weeks.

Castiel is not so presumptuous to believe that he has somehow tamed Dean. Dean still runs. Dean still migrates with the herd. Dean still freezes in the middle of talking or washing the dishes or hanging up clothes and announces that there’s someone in the woods or that a child is lost or that the birds have hatched. Sometimes Castiel will be speaking and Dean will look right through him, ageless somehow. A way of speaking without words. Dean doesn’t speak much at all really. He tells jokes and swears and laughs, but left to his own devices, he just watches. He speaks for Castiel’s benefit, not his own.

When he and Castiel first started meeting, it was less them conversing and more Castiel chattering nervously while Dean studied him, occasionally asking a question.

He’d been heartbroken to learn John Bonham had died a little over thirty years ago. Said as much.

Castiel’s still not sure what Dean sees when he looks at him.

Castiel  had a fairly sizeable nest egg when he’d met Dean, and it had been another year before the feeling between them was too strong. Before Castiel found himself staring out of all of the windows and Dean found himself skirting the edges of the city. Before they couldn’t keep their hands off of each other, their eyes away from each other, their thoughts away from each other.

Castiel sold everything he owned. Bought a bicycle a few how-to books. Dean helped him clean up the house, an old shell of a thing for the first few weeks of that summer. Started a garden in the backyard, bought sturdy clothes, bought plush wool for knitting.

And Dean brought him flowers and told him strange old stories and showed him the best places to hunt and fish and held him close against his body all through the night, smelling of musk and trees and rain and earth.

Castiel is hanging the laundry on the line when he sees something amidst the trees, out of the clearing. The barest blush of color that doesn’t belong there. A new shape.

His heart leaps as Dean springs from the wood and Castiel runs to meet him.

His arms fit so securely around his neck. Dean’s hands were made to settle just over his hips. His forehead rests on Castiel’s just so, letting him look down on him fondly. Softly.

“I told you I would be back,” Dean murmurs.

“I know,” Castiel answers.

His breath tastes like winter air and bitter greens as Castiel kisses him deeply. It is like water in a drought, touching him and smelling him after this long. It places something safe and warm in his chest and soul, this inescapable sensation of being home.

Dean’s body is peppered with scars, both from sparring with males and from being shot by hunters. He doesn’t have any new marks under Castiel’s fingers though, and it leaves a great feeling of relief to have Dean come back healthy and whole.

Castiel pulls away from the kiss to look at Dean. He’s sun-bright and golden, his hair shot through blonde in places and freckles scattered all over his body.  He hasn’t shaved in a while and a scruffy beard settles over his face. His new horns look to be for a stag, and they’re still coated in velvet. They’ll bleed in a few weeks and itch like the devil and stain all of their pillows and sheets but he’s here and he’s home.

Dean crooks his head forward just right and scratches Castiel’s head with his antlers. Castiel laughs, suddenly, and twists his fingers into Dean’s hand.

“We’re not going to need to widen the doors again, are we?” he asks.

Dean smiles and shakes his head.

Falling in love with Dean had been like watching flowers bloom.

He leads Dean into the house. He will sit him in the small, old bathtub and wash him, pulling away the mud and blood and ticks of the season. And then Dean will rise and he will hold Castiel all through the night.

 

 


End file.
